My educational background:

I was in software and systems engineering in the automotive and medical device industry for over 11 years before getting deeply involved in data science and machine learning at scale. I have a MS in electrical engineering from University of Michigan and MS in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon. I also almost completed a MBA from Indiana University but put it on hold to focus on data science.

Some of my greatest achievements to date:

Professional achievement – It was my time as an engineering manager at a medical device startup where my team and I took a prototype system, over the course of 5 years, through animal trials, FDA approval and eventually to the market where the device is currently saving thousands of people’s lives.
Personal achievement – Mentoring a teenage kid from the juvenile court system in inner city Detroit. I did this over the course of 2 years and eventually saw him graduate and be a productive member of society.

What makes you different from the other competitors? What are your strengths?

The ability to understand the business problem deeply and to have both the data engineering and data science skills to be able to come up with actionable insights and to build the engineering infrastructure necessary to operationalize the insights at large scale.

Where my passion for big data comes from:

Knowing that the solutions to many of the worlds problems are centered around the need to be able to use data.